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THE NURSERY SCHOOL was quiet; it was 6.00 p.m. and the toddlers had long since gone home. Rafferty had had a word with the elderly caretaker who lived in the flat above and he had gone off, quietly grumbling to himself. They waited in the ground-floor play-room. Large and airy, it was decorated with a jolly Disney cartoon mural, its colourful characters seemed mocking and, for once, Rafferty managed to look even more long-faced than his sergeant.
In the silence, they heard footsteps approaching down the linoleum-covered hall, but instead of the door to the nursery opening, the suddenly increased roar of the traffic told them that the front door had been opened. Seconds’ later the roar slackened off again as the door shut with a soft click.
Rafferty and Llewellyn exchanged a questioning look that turned to alarm as the unmistakable whish-wishaw of air-brakes hurriedly applied was followed by a deathly silence. They rushed to the street door.
The body lay mangled under the front wheel of a huge Juggernaut. The driver was in his fifties. White-faced and shaking uncontrollably, he clutched the small silver crucifix around his neck as he told them in a dazed voice, ‘Did it deliberately. Looked straight at me and made the Sign of the Cross before stepping off the pavement.' He brought his sleeve across his suddenly wet eyes. 'I couldn't do anything.' Shock was clearly taking a hold for he kept repeating, over and over, like a stuck CD, 'I couldn't do anything.'
Rafferty checked the pulse, but he had guessed before he tried that he would find none. He told Llewellyn to ring for an ambulance, left the distraught driver to the tender mercies of the caretaker, and walked over to the car. He took out the car rug from the back seat. Normally used to protect the covers from the destructive tendencies of his myriad nephews and nieces, he now had a more urgent use for it.
'Noblesse oblige', he murmured softly as he laid the red tartan over Lady Evelyn. Its bright colours made the pooled blood seem less gory. In an odd contrast to Linda Wilks's death, although Lady Evelyn's body was a mess, her face hadn't been touched. It looked as composed in death as it had in life. He thought she'd have been glad about that.
Unlike her late husband, Lady Evelyn accepted that all privilege had its penalties. She had tried to protect her family—the honour of its glorious past and her hopes for its future. But she had failed and had realised that her continued existence would be a liability to her line. Predictably, she had done the honourable thing.
Llewellyn returned. 'The ambulance is on its way.'
Rafferty nodded and settled the rug more cosily around the body, tucking it in so no draught could touch her.
'Messy method to choose,' Llewellyn remarked mournfully.
Rafferty didn't look up from his study of the tartan-shrouded figure on the ground. 'For her it was the cleanest way, the best way. She must have guessed why we had come and didn't want a verdict of double murder and suicide – might blot the family escutcheon – whatever that is.'
'It's a shield for a coat of arms,' Llewellyn told him, dispensing information a little more solemnly than usual.
Rafferty nodded. 'It'll be labelled accidental death, of course, she knew that.'
'Here on earth, perhaps,' stated Llewellyn sombrely. 'But she was a Catholic. Whatever label is applied won't alter the fact that her God would know the truth of it.' With a shake of his head, he turned away. 'Did you ever hear of Bloody Mary, Inspector?'
Bemused, Rafferty stared at his sergeant. 'The drink?'
'No. The Queen.'
Rafferty's face cleared. 'Henry VIII's elder daughter, you mean?' He had heard of the lady. Llewellyn wasn't the only one with an interest in the past, he reflected grimly as he guessed what his sergeant was about to say.
Llewellyn nodded. 'If you remember your history, duty ruled her life, much as it must have ruled Lady Evelyn's. She was a Catholic, too, and she felt it was her duty to rid the country of heretics. Hundreds died in the Smithfield fires. Their deaths were no less repugnant because they died from one woman's dutiful desire to glorify God. He would have condoned their deaths no more than he would condone the ones for which Lady Evelyn was guilty. Murder is murder, however high-principled the murderer.'
Llewellyn was right, as usual. Lady Evelyn had murdered two people, but Rafferty still felt more pity than righteous anger. Even if he couldn't condone her actions any more than God would, he felt he could understand why she had done it.
Poor, sad, disillusioned lady, the burden of her duty was, to her, equally heavy and equally strong—the upholding of the family honour. After all, God had looked after the Melvilles for five hundred years and countless deaths, insurrections and wars. But, even with God's help, no-one held onto their property during the dangerous years after Henry VII's death and the religious turmoil that was to come without getting plenty of blood on their hands. In comparison two murders must seem a trifling matter.
'Didn't you tell me that the Latin of her family motto translated as "Honour above all"?' he asked his sergeant.
Llewellyn gave a slow nod.
'She must have thought God would understand and approve,' said Rafferty softly. 'She sacrificed herself for the dynasty. The next link in the chain was her son, but from what Gilbert said, he was a weak link. Unless he married a strong woman who shared Lady Evelyn's ideals all that she had worked for risked being broken up.
‘I imagine she pushed him into the engagement with the Huntingdon girl. She held the family purse-strings, of course, she probably used that to persuade him to agree.' Rafferty still gazed at Lady Evelyn's shrouded form. 'You'll see, first he'll postpone the wedding – out of filial respect naturally – but somehow I doubt if another date will ever be fixed. Next, he'll put the Hall on the market. Now he's got the money he can start indulging his own dreams instead of his mother's. I imagine he'll find that mechanic of his, Harry, far less demanding than all that rich blue Huntingdon blood.'
As Llewellyn nodded agreement, Rafferty realised how dreadfully lonely Lady Evelyn must have been. Perhaps it might have been different if her husband had loved her, for who would give all their love to a building – however magnificent – if they had a human being worthy of their cherishing?
In the end, her obsession had taken over her life, wrecking it, as well as the lives of several others. Such was the nature of obsessions, of course. Ultimately, they were always destructive. That was why they were so dangerous.
Rafferty knew the servants all slept in a separate annexe over the old stables of the Hall and now he pictured Lady Evelyn in her echoing and empty home, carefully drawing up a tapestry of murder, stitch by stitch until she had made her own shroud.
With a sigh, he stood up. Now he could hear the sirens in the distance. A few minutes’ later, the ambulance drew up and the attendants gathered up Lady Evelyn's body. Rafferty found his shoulders straightening and his hands making the sign of the cross automatically, as he had been taught to do as a boy in the presence of death.
With a start, he realised that, with the case over, he no longer had a valid excuse for avoiding his mother and Maureen, the ‘good catch’.
His shoulders slumped. Feeling as he did, that was the last thing he needed right now. Families, he shook his head sorrowfully; they really could be bloody murder.
What he needed was to cleanse his mind and refresh his spirit in the best way he knew. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would visit a building site, the new one at Colchester. The gaffer of the masons laid his bricks with a deft rhythm that soothed the soul and Rafferty felt sorely in need of such balm.
